Posted by Steve on 09/25/07 19:33

"Good Man" <heyho@letsgo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns99B69570EDD3Fsonicyouth@216.196.97.131...
> "Steve" <no.one@example.com> wrote in news:WO9Ki.39$kv3.0@newsfe12.lga:
>
>> since people have an affinity to paper copies, printing has become an
>> issue with some reports i'm generating. it seems incovenient to the
>> end-users to have to set the orientation to landscape and their
>> margins to 0.25 - which results in a beautiful report. they want a
>> link to download a pdf version that fills all of their needs/wants -
>> something to store/print without having to muck with printer settings.
>>
>> i've looked at fpdf for generating the pdf itself, but i'd really love
>> not having to create a wrapper for it that will take the html and feed
>> it to fpdf including the @media print css that is applied. is there
>> something out there that would do this already? i'd love to use an
>> ob_start callback to pump the html to said wrapper and be done with
>> it.
>>
>> ideas, suggestions?
>
> I prepare nice-looking, properly formatted PDFs quite often via PHP, but
> I don't know if my solution is feasible for you. My solution is the
> product Prince (http://www.princexml.com/ ) which is able to take XML
> (ie: XHTML) or even just plain HTML and turn it into a PDF with *full
> and complete CSS support*. It's bloody brilliant, but here's the
> "unfeasible (infeasible?)" part: it costs $3800USD for a server license.
>
> That being said, if you send them a nice email when you're ready to buy
> it (you can d/l a free working version that outputs watermarks) and
> plead "im poor", they might offer you a discount (we got it at half the
> price - the PDFs we're generating aren't really making us more money).
>
> So, I fopen my php page, echo/save it as a .html file, then send the
> html file to Prince via the PHP api class they supply.
>
> I must say it works *brilliantly* and really there is no other product
> on the market that comes even remotely close in terms of functionality
> and ease of use. You can set page margins, footers, headers, page
> numbering, font embedding, bookmarks, security settings, etc etc. Visit
> the website for more info. Their tech support is fantastic, and a few
> 'requests' that I've made quickly found their way into published
> releases.
>
> For those who understand that good PDF output requires more than
> printing from the browser with a "print" stylesheet, this is the product
> for you.
>
> I am a highly satisfied customer!

thanks for the response.

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